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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, this is interesting.

Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.

We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.

It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.

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> We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all

Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.

> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.

Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.

To your point, the argument about the 20% Gas Export tax has been interesting. Fossil fuel lobbyists employed by foreign companies clearly and openly buying politicians to try and fend it off, when it's obviously in Australia's interests to implement it.

> Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything.

Why?

Property doesn't produce anything. If I buy a house for $500K and sell it a year later for $600K, that extra $100K hasn't been added to the economy. Something else had to make that money. It's just speculation.

Whereas if I invested that $500K in a company, the company makes things or provides services that add value. If the company grows to make my investment worth $600K a year later, that has actually been added to the economy.

Note that I'm defining property to not include construction, which is a separate thing, that does add value.

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